Rubenerd

Having posted several entries on the Australian Government's plan to implement a compulsory national internet filter, it seems I've unwittingly rattled a few nerves. For the first time since coming out as an atheist back in 2007 I've started receiving email about a series of posts here, all of them not good.

A shocked introduction thing

I debated long and hard in my mind whether to publish these and decided not to, but enough people on Twitter who are actively engaged in this debate suggested I do so on the proviso I don't disclose the senders' names. I've contacted each in person to ask if they'd be okay with identifying them, in the meantime they'll be anonymous.

As to their assertions, I'm still not sure how to respond yet. While I made playful jabs at Stephen Conroy and Michael Atkinson for what I see as ill-informed decisions that will deepy hurt Australia in ways I worry they don't realise or can even imagine, I never used harsh language against them and it was not my intention to be mean spirited and attack them personally. I also think it's weird that I started getting all these messages when I haven't got blog related email in months. Could I be on an evil do-ers list that's being passed around maybe?

Message One

Dear Reuben,

You obviously don’t realize this because you’re a whiny little kid but you are the reason why an internet filter is excactly what Australians need. I have read your news coverage on your web-site and I have been horrified at your biased attitude. You spew your lies and filth and slander against our elected officials and don’t give them the respect they deserve so you can watch your porn and disgusting Japanese animation shows and speak hatred PRENTEDING YOU ARE SAVING FREE SPEECH. Well I have news for you Reuben television stations, newspapers, radio stations, and magazines are all regulated to keep smut and hatred out and the Internet should be treated without any difference.

Message Two

Hello

I have been reading your blog about what you colourfully refer to as The Great Firewall Of Australia. I don’t know who you’re trying to impress but if you’re happy with child pornography you’re a paedophile and I should have you arrested because you are fucking disgusting. Do your parents know you do this?

Message Three

Dear Ruben Schade,

My close friend showed me your website, and I agree with her that you have an arrogant attitude problem about the Labor Party’s internet filter that they won an election promoting. If you are talking about democracy why not bring that up? I know why, it’s because you’re a coward hiding behind your computer screen. Your a fucking pussy.

There are two more, but they consisted of more four letter words than actual arguments. Maybe it's time to hide my email address, I don't want to go through all this again :(.

I didn't have this much trouble burning FreeBSD 8.0. Its interesting it's not afraid to burn a CD with a daemon logo, but slap a blue hat on a guy and suddenly it freaks out. I suppose though it's an improvement that it's not telling me to talk to myself!

Has Google Reader (or Google Accounts in general) implemented a stricter timeout system for logins, does anyone know? I've been automatically logged out several times today with the above message cheerfully displayed when it never used to happen before.

I'm thinking it could be my newly cleaned out cookie whitelist for PermitCookies in Firefox, but just want to make sure. Could Buzz have anything at all to do with it perhaps? If they are timing out sessions earlier it could be beneficial for security but I tend to have Reader permanently open in a tab and I'd hate to have to re-login every hour or so.

What I love about Twitter is the spontaneousness (is that a word?) of random discussions about virtually anything. Today @oliyoung, @chimpocalypse and I were responding to the South Aussie government's ambitious road plans by taking about high speed rail and how Australia desperately needs it.

I remember earlier last year having a discussion with Todd Tyrtle in Google Reader about the prospect of Aussie high speed rail because we're both those weird people who don't have nor want a car. Despite loving high speed rail when we're in Europe on holidays and so on, at the time I rehashed the talking points I'd been given about the problems with such a system in Australia, namely that high speed rail is only competitive with air travel within certain distances, and Australia's major cities are too far apart and too low in population to be worthwhile. In Europe and the seaboards of North America you have the population density to support trains, in Australia you've got far fewer people and far greater distances between them.

When I though about it though, even if air travel may be faster I still think there'd be a market for high speed trains for the convenience and the fact you feel mighty better stepping off a train than you do when you've been in a pressurised tube trillions of kilometres in the air. Then there are the arguments that trains take you to the centre of town not an orbital airport in the middle of nowhere that you then have to commute in and out of. Plus you'd get to view some spectacular scenery city slickers like me would otherwise never see.

My grandiose plan!

What would be fantastic are high speed routes from Perth, through Adelaide then down to Melbourne, across to Canberra, then Sydney, along the NSW coast to Brisbane then along QLD up to Cairns. The Ghan could act as the auxiliary route from Adelaide through the red centre to Darwin.

I haven't talked to one single Aussie who says a high speed rail line would be a bad idea, although as that episode of South Park demonstrated I suppose the airlines (especially the budget ones) would lobby hard to make sure such a system would never leave the drawing board. Which is real shame.

Got an email from Microsoft this afternoon. Yes I am aware the release candidate for Windows 7 wasn't the final version, and yes I'm aware it wasn't supposed to be used after a cut off date, but this is ridiculous.

While most people who tested Windows 7 have now moved to the final version, some are still running the Release Candidate. If you haven’t moved yet, it’s time to replace the RC.

Starting on March 1, 2010 your PC will begin shutting down every two hours. Your work will not be saved during the shutdown.

The Windows 7 RC will fully expire on June 1, 2010.

The emphasis was added by them, not me.

Multiple versions, forcing people who bought machines with crippled introductory software versions to upgrade to a less crippled version, staggered shutdowns with deleted files, who else could get away with this stuff other than maybe SAP et al?

Fortunately the retail copy of Windows 7 I run in a VM for a few Windows applications I still need still lets me use the Classic interface. I still reckon Windows 95 was the closest Microsoft came to creating a pleasant, clean, usable interface, and kudos to them at least for letting me still use it over Aero.

As for stunts like this, it just shows what a company like Microsoft can get away with with so much cloud and a terms of service agreement they know virtually nobody reads.

Having dabbled in a ton of different languages lately, I felt the overwhelming urge this week just to get back to some good ol' C, and what better and more productive way to do so that to mess around with ncurses!

I have to come clean and admit this, but I've never really used ncurses for anything other than some rudimentary crap, and what little I did I've completely forgotten in a vast ocean of nested Java System.in streamreaders. I've written a ton of scripts and basic applications to run in the shell (mostly for server admin tasks) but I've never used ncurses to make more sophisticated shell interfaces, so I thought I'd finally give it a shot.

Getting ncurses in the first place

The first thing that always trips me up is I forget having the ncurses binaries (which most free and open source OSs do) is different from having the development versions you can include in C code. Fortunately it's really simple to install on at least the systems I maintain.

Here's a quiz: which is for FreeBSD and which is for Fedora? :)

# pkg_add -rv ncurses-devel
or
# cd /usr/ports/devel/ncurses-devel
# make install clean

# yum install ncurses-devel

In either case, it works! Hallelujah! I can never spell that word.

#include <stdarg.h>
#include <ncurses.h>

int main(void) {
    initscr();
    printw("Grilled cheese sandwiches!");
    refresh();
    getch();
    endwin();

    return 0; /* Is all gooooood! */
}

The iPad has just come out!? Why ncurses?

Two reasons. First, I have a whole bunch of machines that just exist to run Folding@Home that don't have X on them at all, and I would love to create pretty little interfaces I could use with them.

Secondly, and you'll probably think it's silly, but our first family computer was a DOS machine and I've always wanted to write my own *nix versions of some of my favourite old DOS applications that I can run in FreeBSD or on my Mac Terminal. For example, my favourite editor of all time is still the IBM E Editor, and having a version of that with syntax highlighting would make me ditch Vim, nano and TextMate for good! I know, I know, it's sad and silly, but it'd be so much fun! Do any open source implementations of REXX exist? That was a fun language :).

My studies start again in two weeks, wonder how much of this I can do before then? At the very least I'd like to have that old DOS menu system ported. Sounds like an alcoholic beverage.

From Uncyclopedia, parody of LOL WUT. Some people clearly have too much spare time! Hey, wait.

I've briefly mentioned this particular issue in passing with regards to the Great Firewall of Australia and to a lesser extent the persecution of South Australian gamers, but now I'm going to rant and complain about it for an entire post. Two words: caramel macchiato. Wait, I got distracted. Two words: brain drain.

A quickie recap thing

So far we've figured out Senator Conroy's filter won't work for the following reasons:

• It is trivially easy to be technologically circumvented
• It will drastically cut Australia’s already terrible internet speeds
• The blacklist will be private so we won’t know about false positives
• Oh yeah, false positives
• It puts Australia in the same league as the PRC and North Korea
• It makes Australia the laughing stock of the world

The Conroy hits the fan

Despite all the conspiracy theorists who claim governments are secretly coordinating to keep track of us, as globalisation takes hold governments actually have less control over their people and what they can and can't do. If the case is made that Australia values lip service to blocking material they [secretly] deem inappropriate over the viability of Australia's fledgling IT industry, intelligent people will actively avoid doing business in Australia. This will hurt everyone.

It gets worse than that. I grew up in Singapore and went to the Australian International School with several hundred other expatriate children. Most of them decided to return to Australia, but a statistically significant number chose to remain overseas. I have friends living in Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, the United Kingdom, and Canada; we consider ourselves global citizens without obligations to any one state. It would be naive to say these people avoided returning to Australia primarily because of the filter, but if they're focused on IT it would be crazy to consider returning, and they've said as much.

In high school economics we learned about Australia's brain drain problem, that many of Australia's best and brightest would move overseas to work. This filter will act as much as a push factor as overseas opportunities act as a pull, and if Steven Conroy, Michael Atkinson with his rabid obsession with labelling gamers as evil and the Labor party are aware of this (heck, even if they're unaware) they should be held responsible for the further flight.

The bottom is the best place for an ending

Welcome to the 21st century Steven Conroy and Michael Atkinson. If you piss off well educated people who have the means to travel, they will simply wave, move away, apply themselves passionately to their jobs in a society that values their contributions over lip service and pay their taxes to them instead. It's your call.

Now if you'd excuse me I'm off to take the subway three stops then grab a cup of coffee in a cafe with free WiFi that's faster than the home internet connection I pay a small fortune for in Adelaide. I don't need to worry about a timetable because if I miss the train there will be another one in two minutes.

This isn't a technology or cute anime story, but I felt compelled to comment on it. Here's the link to the story, and here's the comment: Dick Cheney is a war criminal and should be tried as such in a civilian court. He didn't want to give full civilian court rights to suspected terrorists, but I'm a reasonable person.

On Sunday, Cheney pronounced himself “a big supporter of waterboarding,” a near-drowning technique that has been regarded as torture back to the Spanish Inquisition and that has long been treated by U.S. authorities as a serious war crime, such as when Japanese commanders were prosecuted for using it on American prisoners during World War II.

Cheney then went further. Speaking with a sense of impunity, he casually negated a key line of defense that senior Bush officials had hidden behind for years – that the brutal interrogations were approved by independent Justice Department legal experts who thus gave the administration a legitimate reason to believe the actions were within the law.

If a senior official from any other nation admitted that, there'd be a storm of controversy and people demanding action against them.

This post originally appeared on the Annexe.

I never saw the point of widescreens until I started using Twitter. Should set up some pretty colours next :)